Dell EMC is boosting its storage team by upward of 25 percent by hiring 1,200 new storage sales specialists with the goal of skyrocketing channel storage revenue in 2018.

Scott Millard, vice president of global channels specialty sales at Dell EMC, said the hiring of the 1,200 employees is the shot in the arm needed to widen its market-share leadership position in various storage segments.

We’re going to help them do that with these additional resources that we’re investing in to help enable them better around storage,” said Millard. “We’ve hired around 1,100 so far who are really dedicated to storage. It is a major investment for us. We’ve invested in data center partner managers that are aligned to data center sales executives. We’ve invested in channel specialty sales executives that are really subject matter experts. Those people are really focused on a partner-led selling motion.”

The hires are part of a massive investment in storage R&D. “We invested $2 billion in R&D just in storage over the past 12 months—that’s more than a number of our competitors’ total annual revenue,” said Millard. “We continue to invest in people to support our partners to enable them and sell with them collaboratively.”

Partners said they’re already seeing the benefits from the additional resources being fed through the channel.

“We’ve had really good channel communications and we’re seeing more support in the field even already as far as storage services go,” said Robert Keblusek, CTO of Sentinel Technologies, a Downers Grove, Ill., solution provider and Dell EMC partner. “We’re working with them pretty closely in each engagement and starting to see our storage activity ramp back up with them as we speak,” he said.

“What we’re seeing now is more clarity in the direction and a better understanding of the go-to-market engagement. That’s a big piece. I feel like they are more on track and we are definitely now seeing more resources,” Keblusek said.

The worldwide enterprise storage market grew 14 percent year over year during the third quarter of 2017, reaching $11.8 billion, according to research firm IDC. The research firm said it was the first double-digit growth in the enterprise storage market in several years thanks to strong demand for all-flash, software-defined and converged and hyper-converged offerings. “The market is consuming storage, whether it’s going into the cloud, going on-premise—wherever it might be—storage continues to rise,” said Keblusek. “So it is absolutely a good investment for Dell. It’s a very wise move on their part to sort of double-click on storage.”

Michael Goldstein, CEO of LAN Infotech, a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., solution provider and Dell EMC partner, said his company’s storage sales grew approximately 25 percent annually in 2017. Dell’s new storage innovation and ability to be a “one-stop shop” provider has been key to that increase, he said.

Dell’s new personnel will be placed around the globe as part of Dell’s data center solutions sellers predominantly focused on storage. Underneath that are inside support team members as well as specialty leads for each one of the company’s storage product lines, according to Marius Haas, president and chief commercial officer for Dell EMC.

“We clearly anticipate from what had been over the last year or two years, we’ve had a slight share loss, we want to pivot that to a share gain and then we want to pivot that to a clear premium to the market on a growth trajectory standpoint,” said Haas. “All of that we want to get done next fiscal year.”